Real Estate Feedback Solutions
Since the stated purpose of this blog is to advertise My Showing Log, I better do at least a little of that.
Here is how My Showing Log ?came about. Several years back I went to a seminar to pick up a few educational credits.
The speaker was a real estate attorney. He was banging away at the idea that we Realtors had a lot of work to do to justify our comissions. He was talking about how the internet was going to kill our business if we couldn’t justify ourselves. He said that new for sale by owner internet companies were going to give everyone a run for ?our money.
The speaker got me thinking. ? I thought if all of these people were going to sell their own homes maybe I ?should be part of that. I started a web site called doFSBO.com. ?This led ?me to ?a flat fee broker model which which I figured out pretty quickly ?was not for me. I’m not a list ‘em and leave ‘em kind of guy and a person has to get paid more than a flat fee ?to survive.
I downgraded dofsbo.com to an informational site.
But I had learned something. ?In breaking down the process of selling real estate for someone who knew nothing about it, I discovered there were things I could do to make life ?better for myself.
Being a broker ?owning a ?small company I get calls at home on weekends and at night from other agents wanting showings. Ocassionally I’d forget notes at home or the office ?and ?miss recording a showing. Sometimes ?I wouldn’t have a lockbox code handy. There were times I actually drove to my office to get information about a listing.
I ?realized ? the FSBO Site had a showing log and I started using it myself. Suddenly I had information for all of my office listings available to me wherever I had an internet connection. I hired a programmer to professionally reprogram what had already been done. We added user accounts for my agents and front desk help.
Since the beginning of time I had had trouble keeping up with feedback. I knew agents who just told customers they didn’t do feedback. I would like to say I was really smart and it just occured to me I could request feedback by email, but what really happened was I got a feedback form from another agent using some other service. I thought it was a great idea and I checked it out.
The problem was that I didn’t like the way the service worked. The listing agent had to type in a lot of information for every showing and the system for requesting feedback had a very “spammy” feel to me. Every agent was on their own and there was no way to tie an office together.
I spoke with another broker who voiced the same frustrations.
It seemed like we should be able to tie the feedback thing into the tool I already had. I went to work with my programmer again.
The result is My Showing Log. You can access all of your listing information all of the time. You can allow other agents in your office, like the floor person or your assistant to set up showings. My showing log is smart enough to find showing agent information from an MLS ID or a partial name. It does this using a direct ?RETS connection to MLS. ?You can make notes about the showing agent or the individual showing. My showing log remembers the last twenty agents who requested showings so you can just click on the name to enter a new showing.
When a showing is set up My Showing log timestamps the request and automatically keeps track of who entered it.
Just click a box and My Showing Log ?will send an email confirmation to the showing agent. If you like it will copy that confirmation to the seller and/or the listing agent. After the showing has occured My Showing log will send a simple form to the showing agent requesting feedback. The results of the feedback response are stored in my showing Log. You can also have the feedback results emailed directly to your seller and to your own email account. The response rate is greater than 80%.
If you happen to speak with an agent and get feedback on a showing its easy to ad this to the data collected on line. If you are in an area with non-MLS agents or if you want to record a visit by an appraiser just ad the name and it will be remembered.
My Showing Log does not require much information to set up a ?listing and its best if you enter ?each of those few ?fields even if they are not required. Specifcally, remember to upload a property photo. This increases your feedback response rate. Also be sure to enter the expiration date of your listing. Having an expiration date allows My Showing Log to warn you when a property is about to expire. We have had several comments ?saying what a nice feature this is.
The current My Showing Log is excellent, but there is a lot more to come. We have plans, but we would like your ideas as well.